Structure
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Beginning
The exposition of the short story “The Skirt” begins in medias res with a description of main character Bethany’s wheelchair:
Wheelchairs are ageing. Or so my mother says. They add ten years, like sprouting grey roots. And anti-wrinkle creams won’t help. Neither will painting your wheelchair red, but I got my brother to do it anyway. Rob drew Manga style hamsters on the sides. If you’re stared at, it should be for hamsters (ll. 1-4).
This description serves not only to introduce the story’s main themes, related to physical disability, but also its characters (Bethany, her mother, and her brother Rob) and their attitudes towards Bethany’s illness.
All three characters seem to …
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Middle
The rising action continues with the characters having a breakfast of “pills with gluten-free muesli” (l. 20). This scene further highlights the mother’s controlling attitude: “My mother had lined up her pills in rainbow colours” (l.20). It also adds to the characterization of the mother as “an advert for alternative medicine” (l. 26) who “had so many illnesses and the herbalist kept filling and fixing her with tisanes and tinctures” (ll. 26-27).
During breakfast, Bethany has a first flashback to the start of her illness. One morning she woke up and she “could not move” (l. 33), and an “ache hummed down my back” (l. 34). From this, and from the way she refers to her condition as “a metamorphosis ” (l. 32), the reader is first led to believe that Bethany’s paralysis was something unexpected, without a cause. The truth is revealed…
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Ending
The story’s falling action begins with Bethany’s trip to the bus station and is characterized by a sense of rising tension as her worries that she will not be able to enter the bus with her wheelchair combine with her shame that people will see her in this condition. On her way to the bus station, she has another flashback about her doctor’s puzzlement concerning the causes of her illness and her vague explanations.
At the bus stop, Bethany’s problems of integrating into society and her shame and anger caused by her disability are highlighted: “A little girl in a pushchair watched me, cur…
